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The circus is in town!

Posted on September 19, 2016 at 6:05 AM

Back to it! Shiny new school uniforms, a change of all our clothing and footwear towards the coming autumn, too may apples coming off the trees to keep up and a scramble for recipes to use them, updated software on your phone and computer, new colleagues in familiar settings, the leaves falling into foggy mornings and ever shorter, ever crisper autumn days. Change is with us, as ever. The season's change theme is there in the bigger arena at its usual dizzying speed and ferocity for public services. What leaders managers staff and partners are dealing with reminds me of a massive troop of jugglers or acrobats in a brightly floodlit arena where dropping what you're trying to control could see you fed to the lions. A new government is no respecter - when was it ever? - of the fact you were already busy before they arrived with their file of "ideas I've had on a shelf waiting for the time to be ripe." By my reckoning we have, at the very least, all of the following. Don't hold your breath on any of them. 1. The continued will it/won't it dance over devolution of real Whitehall powers to town halls, where people seem to be a mixture of very capable and very frustrated, confused and optimistic. Change desperately needed, localities up for it, language and thinking gaps - not least ideological - between centre and localities. 2. The need to undo, but the simultaneous will to maintain, a Gordian knot of complexity and misunderstanding over integration and partnership between adult social care and health services. Change desperately needed, and the various parties veering between knowing what everybody else is thinking planning and doing, and a blame game over who's stopping progress. 2 government departments with different cultures over letting the people who know what to do get on and do it. 3. The constant dance between centre and local government over schooling: what it should look like, who should govern lead and hold it to account, what public money is and isn't allowed to do, who should learn where, being supported challenged and intervened in both how, and by whom. Stubborn myths abound: that local government is a dead hand (it isn't); that local government should take charge (OK then fund it to do so); that grammar schools aid social mobility and will overturn the class divide (they don't and won't); that exams are easy and/or, conversely, children are stupid (not so on either count). 4. HS2 seems to have become an exercise in spending money that isn't there, on a development that might or might not happen, led by people who have recently arbitrarily taken a ruler and pencil to the map of South Yorkshire, rubbing out one line people didn't want and replacing it with another one that other people don't want instead. Meanwhile money seems to drain out through an open sluice, whilst the North's provincial train services aren't going to see improvements any time soon and along any route both regeneration and social cohesion suffer. 5. There's more. The effects on communities of the Brexit vote for example, many of them hardly edifying. Welfare reform creating more difficulties than it solves. Housing reform, ditto. The continuing growth of pressures on and simultaneously shrinking resources in services to children young people and their families, ahead of their need for specialist intervention, as well as once they are in sufficient crisis to need a social worker. Topics for another day - or several! It's trite but nonetheless true to say change is ever with us. But in this particular circus, there is a simultaneous need to not drop either the balls or the spinning acrobat, or worse, bring the big top down on all our heads. 2 big issues continue. Firstly, it seems equally endemic that we resist thinking our way into the other partners' heads, or working out what each of us is saying when we discuss how to get from here to where we want to be. And secondly, capacity to do both the ongoing day job and the huge and challenging change job seems ever harder to find in heavily strapped financial times. I would be fascinated to get into dialogue with those who are problem solving their way through all this without hurting the lives of the people they serve, hence publishing these musings as the season turns towards darker nights and politicians and officials alike attend summits and conferences as those nights draw in.

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Ah, to live in interesting times!

I'm sure that, like me, for many contacts and colleagues, working days are running in anything but the usual order, anything but the usual way. For me, business has stopped for the time being, all bar finishing off some vital tasks to conclude a great assignment with a client whose people gave, gave and gave again as I worked to help them problem solve and solution find. I am still adjusting to the fact that, the diary being on hold (not closed!) there is, for the first time in my working life, no rush. No urgency in getting that domestic business done around my business and the people who seek to use it. I can take my time in the kitchen and the garden, at the piano or in my permitted outside exercise a day. This is not my style, and it makes me a bit jumpy. It's a struggle to believe it, let alone let my clock run slower than usual. For former colleague DCSs and their staff and partners, whilst some of the everyday clutter might have set itself aside, their days are very full, their sleeves rolled up and their heroic efforts focused on ensuring the people they serve are as safe as possible, for as long as possible, with as much dignity and support as can be afforded them. I salute them, as ever. I do remember what single community crises were like when I did the job. But then there was simply nothing of the scale, or the likely longevity, of the current massive challenge facing them, and society, right now.

This period of enforced introspection has got me thinking, mostly in the researcher part of my brain. What I see on a daily basis is that, beyond the muppets who don't think Covid19 is serious or could affect them and won't modify their conduct beyond getting mad and behaving badly, thousands of people are just doing good. Volunteering, offering simple help like dropping off shopping on a neighbour's doorstep, going a LOT further and putting themselves on the line, offering free online support to parents whose children are not at school so everybody may be feeling the strain. The observer in me is starting to hatch some ideas that would bear scrutiny when this is all over. Here are some research questions you might help me think about!

Will the economy recover? Or will we have to grow to being, by necessity, a more socially aware nation that seeks out and supports our strugglers rather than blaming them for their own situations then getting on with our own lives? What will a national workforce look like when we are through the other side? Will we stay connected, or are we likelier to go back to being frantic, self-absorbed, as our pre-crisis behaviour tended to make us? Will the memory of when people pulled together, stayed local, formed bonds via Zoom or Skype or WhatsApp linger? Will we mark when we realised that "We don't need that meeting" was an actual thing? When people found both altruism and skills they didn't know they had? When all this is over, can we harness citizen research as well as that done in academia to explore the phenomena we are witnessing as people turn towards others as well as addressing their own concerns? Or does it take a serious crisis, another Covid19, to make us step into a shared mental and emotional space and capture what it teaches us rather than staying in our own, meaning we will forget? I'm working on some approaches to research bodies on all this, given this is a truly remarkable, as well as a sad, scary, deeply unsettling and uncertain - an "interesting" - time.

If you would like to co-explore what I ruminated on above, or if like me you are watching fascinated as people stop buying what they don't need and concentrate on what they and others do need? Together? Please get in touch!

And in the meantime? Stay safe. Good luck. And if you are in an organisation that's keeping us all going, thank you.

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Ah, to live in interesting times!